Trusting and Agile: Chocolate Soup and Assembly – Making Sure that Employee Recognition Comes First EP 12
This episode of Culture Crush focused on the conversation of employee recognition. We were able to highlight two great individuals leading two employee recognition companies. Dan Silivestru with Chocolate Soup and Jonathan Fields with Assembly provided insight into the need for company recognition to the employees as we way that can increase company culture, brand recognition, and increase engagement and retention of the staff.
Their two companies compliment each other with the support they give to employee recognition. Assembly allows the employees the opportunity to provide recognition to their peers while Chocolate Soup allows the leadership team to provide recognition to the employees on all of their special days.
85% OF HR LEADERS SAY EMPLOYEE RECOGNITION PROGRAMS ENHANCE THEIR ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE.
79% OF EMPLOYEES SAY THEY WOULD BE MORE LOYAL TO THEIR EMPLOYERS IF THEY RECEIVED MORE RECOGNITION.
This episode is great for all listeners. We can all connect with working for a company with a good culture or a bad culture, so we can all connect to the discussion of employee recognition as well.
We encourage company leaders to listen to this episode to gain two new resources that are designed to help employee recognition and therefor the overall health of the company culture. These two resources can drastically help improve the engagement of the staff by showing them the recognition they need.
Chocolate Soup was born out of a sheer passion for building great company culture in support of happy, caring, and respectful teams. They’re here to help companies of all sizes discover the power of radical generosity, surprise and delight by recognizing important employee milestones with expertly curated, personal gifts.
Chocolate Soup offers a subscription-based employee recognition program that delivers beautifully curated gift boxes filled with treats and gifts. Companies can recognize their employees’ work anniversaries, birthdays, children and pet birthdays and more.
They also offer custom gift boxes for company events or for unique milestones including weddings and new home purchases.
Chocolate Soup lives and breathes employee happiness!
Dan Silivestru is the co-founder and CEO of Chocolate Soup. A life-long entrepreneur, Dan and his partner Pj Lowe have founded three previous startups, selling TinyHippos to RIM (BlackBerry) in 2011.
Their experience closing down their last startup, bitHound, gave them the idea for Chocolate Soup and its mission to help companies with employee recognition, engagement, and retention through beautifully curated, locally sourced gift boxes.
In addition to running Chocolate Soup, Dan also serves on the board of several startups and mentors early-stage founders with their startups.
Follow Chocolate Soup on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Assembly is an employee recognition and rewards solution that ensure employees feel appreciated and acknowledged for their hard work.
Jonathan Fields started his career in investment banking. After one short year he realized that his efforts were not truly valued and wanted to work in a more collaborative environment. Jonathan joined a small startup called ZipRecruiter as the 15th employee. The company went on to grow to over 1,000 employees and recently went public.
After 7 amazing years at ZipRecruiter Jonathan realized he wanted to better the employee experience and make work more efficient so he went on to build Assembly. In the past year Assembly has grown over 3,000% and continues to better work life culture in this changing environment.
Jonathan is an avid golfer, lives in Marina Del Rey with his fiance Eliana and has a mini golden doodle named Charlie. Jonathan also has a very immature sense of humor and is obsessed with Coldstone.
Follow Assembly on LinkedIn.
About Culture Crush
Culture Crush is officially relaunched! We are thankful to Debra Caron who launched and hosted the show originally. Culture Crush is back with a new host but the same focus- highlighting what makes a great company culture and how it affects the overall success of a company.
Culture is not just a tag word to be thrown around. It is not something you throw in job descriptions to draw people to applying for jobs within a company.
According to Marcus Buckingham and Ashely Goodall in their book Nine Lies About Work, “Culture is the tenants of how we behave. It’s like a family creed. This is how we operate and treat each other in the family.”
On this long form podcast we will highlight companies local to Arizona and beyond that are crushing it with great culture!
We will talk with company leaders to learn about real-life experiences, tips, and best practices for creating a healthy work environment where employees are finding joy and satisfaction in their work while also striving and growing within the company.
About the Host
Kindra Maples is your new host taking the lead on the relaunch of Culture Crush! She is spartan racer, past animal trainer, previous magician’s assistant, and has a weakness for Oreo cookie shakes. Her journey working with people actually started working with animals as a teenager (don’t worry we won’t go that far back for her bio).
She worked for over 15 years in the zoo industry working with animals and the public. Her passion of working with animals shifted into working with people in education, operations and leadership roles. From there her passion of leadership and helping people develop has continued to grow.
Then came the opportunity for relaunching the Culture Crush Podcast and she jumped on it. Leadership, growth, and strong company cultures are all areas that Kindra is interested in diving into further.
Shout Outs
We want to thank a few people for their behind the scenes effort in helping this relaunch to come to life. James Johnson with Tailored Penguin Media Company LLC.– It is a small, but powerful video production company with a goal to deliver the very best by articulating the vision of your brand in a visually creative way. Gordon Murray with Flash PhotoVideo, LLC. -Flash Gordon has been photographing since high school and evolving since then with new products that will equip, encourage, engage, and enable. Renee Blundon with Renee Blundon Design – She is not only one of the best free divers (that’s not how she helped with the podcast) but she is great with graphics design and taking the direction for the vision that you have while also adding creative ideas to bring to your vision to life.
These are just a few of the folks that supported the relaunch of the podcast. If you would like to be part of the Culture Crush team or would like to support underwriting the show- please reach out: culturecrushpodcast@gmail.com
About Our Sponsor
For 23 years Catholic Education Arizona has helped serve underserved children with $268 million in scholarships. Catholic High Schools have a 99.4% graduation rate and 97% move on to higher
education or military service.
Participating partners like APS, BBVA, and Grand Canyon University receive a dollar-for-dollar Arizona State Tax Credit. The corporate partners enjoy helping our future work force, Building the Arizona community and future leaders!
The partners also enjoy promotion in Catholic Education Arizona’s newsletter, social media channels and podcast! For more information, call 602-218-6542 or visit www.ceaz.org – they are changing lives one scholarship at a time!
